Until Dawn director wanted to make his movie about ‘pretty much all’ horror genres
“Every night, every time it resets, it’s a new horror genre,” director David F. Sandberg told Polygon in a call. “We get pretty much all of it in here — slasher, supernatural, body horror, found footage, even monsters. To me, who’s been wanting to do a horror movie for forever, it was great to get to do all of it and try subgenres I hadn’t before.”
A new trailer released on Thursday shows off more of the time loop, and a new twist: Every loop has a different murderous threat lurking in the shadows. One of these threats looks like the wendigo from the original game, but we also see a masked slasher, a creepy clown doll, a scene where a girl’s stomach swells and stretches as she screams, and an ominous flash revealing a giant in the mists.
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While Until Dawn uses the time loop as a narrative device, it doesn’t play into the same tropes as similar titles. “In a classical Groundhog Day sense, you have characters who learn from each loop. You can’t do that here, because it changes every time. You just die in different ways,” Sandberg said.
The characters are also less combative and confrontational than they are in the original game, possibly because the true threat is far less obscured, and it becomes clear that they need to work together in some capacity. Writer and producer Gary Dauberman told Polygon he had to explore each character as they were sent through this experience, dealing with not just the horror of being trapped in a time loop, but the unpredictability of each loop hiding a different killer. In the original game, it made sense the that teens could run, hide, and fight their way to survival, but it’s hard to imagine how they could fight back against a towering giant or malevolent spirit.
“You only get so many chances,” said Sandberg. “It wouldn’t be fun if they could just die and come back again, over and over again, forever. We had to introduce a limit to it, to make it even more challenging for our poor characters. We really put them through hell.”
Until Dawn is scheduled for theatrical release on April 25, 2025.
